Vivienne de Watteville - Speak To The Earth (1935)

Speak To The Earth (1935)

In 1928-29 Vivienne returned to Kenya for seven months, officially to photograph and film elephants, but on a personal level to seek solitude Thoreau-style and fulfil a personal dream of going into the wilds unarmed and "in some unforeseen way to win the friendship of the beasts". After overcoming official resistance - she was by then a minor celebrity in the Colony and, an aristocratic beauty, in demand socially - she spent five months camping in the Maasai Game Reserve on the border with Tanganyika, alone but for four porters, her dog Siki, her books, gramophone and collection of classical records, and an armed askari (the colonial officials were taking no chances). Despite bouts of malaria she mostly achieved her aims: she was tolerated by the elephants, and her chosen camp-site near Namanga turned out to be rhino grazing-ground, with the rhinos returning to graze around the tents. She narrowly escaped death in a close encounter with a lion (thinking the visitor one night was a hyaena, she left her tent to chase it off with a pail, realising her mistake too late to retreat: she was so close to the lion she could have touched it), and twice with charging rhinos that missed her by inches; she climbed two mountains (Ol Doinyo Orok and Longido); and she killed no animals except, at the request of the local Maasai, a man-eating lioness, shot by her askari.

She then spent an idyllic two months (January-February 1929) based in Urumandi Hut on Mount Kenya, in the giant heather and parkland zone, some of the time with two porters and some alone, exploring the mountain and valleys, bathing naked in the rock-pools below the Nithi Falls, befriending the birds and small animals, collecting flowers and seeds, and sketching the flora. While up at the peaks she witnessed the third ascent of Mount Kenya, by Eric Shipton, Percy Wyn-Harris and Gustav Sommerfelt (January 1929), who next day took her on a scramble around the south-face glaciers. She thanked them on their return to Urumandi Hut with perfectly-mixed cocktails. In her last weeks on the mountain she and the porters saved the alpine hut from a forest fire after a day-long struggle. Suffering toothache a few days later, rather than cut short her stay and return to Nairobi, Vivienne pulled out the tooth herself with pliers from her tool kit. This second journey to Africa resulted in her book Speak to the Earth: Wanderings among Elephants and Mountains, published in 1935. The unnamed 100 m. waterfalls below Lake Michaelson high up the Gorges Valley on Mount Kenya were shortly after called the Vivienne Falls in her honour.